Data Visualization on Enterprise Storage

Our project was to create a way for system administrators who use IBM Spectrum Protect to more easility understand information on their system. Improving their understand and ease of use should lead to more efficient and cost-effective management.

The idea to use data visualization comes from the fact that the IBM SPectrum Protect interface displays a lot of data in table form, with not much help to interpret and manage the data. In IBM's case they did not have a sure method to visually show a system administrator the status of their company/business information on these servers. Even some veteran users of IBM Spectrum Protect have difficulty deciphering what is or is not important for their management needs. In other words, IBM needs an easy to use visualization system to provide to their customers who use Spectrum Protect. This should allow administrators to make better informed decisions regarding the storage of their information on Spectrum Protect servers. That is where team FNS comes in.

Our task was to solve this problem and to create a tool for the system administrators who use Spectrum Protect. In order to solve this problem we first asked ourselves "What kind of information, that IBM provides, is most useful in properly managing data on a Spectrum Protect server?" With this in mind we were able to take all of the relevant information given by IBM and create meaningful and intuitive visuals for that information. These visuals would in turn be the tools that a system administrator would use to gain a better grasp on the current status of the information that they store on Spectrum Protect servers. Each of the different visuals provide an immediate grasp of the status of different aspects how their data is handled and stored on Spectrum Protect servers which leads to being able to better manage that same data.

In the end we were able to create a variety of visuals for system administrators. This in turn shows IBM that creating visual representations for important data can have a real impact on how a system administrator goes about managing the data on IBM's Spectrum Protect servers.

NOTE: The initial concept for this project was provided by our sponsor, in the form of a Capstone project proposal.